Once their leader changed, they all started changing. Max stood there for a long moment, the urge he’d been feeling all week—the primal urges to hunt and fight and fuck and kill all rolled into one big, confusing, pushing need—grew in him to unmanageable proportions. His chest tightened. He couldn’t breathe. He fell to his knees, tried to clutch at the burning pain in his ribs that seemed to spread out to his limbs, only to find that he couldn’t quite bend his arms the way they used to.
Not as bad as last time. It was an oddly calm thought to have when he felt as though his body was being ripped limb from limb. He looked down at his ruined hand and saw it in stark black-and-white, the edges kind of fuzzy. It shrank to a wide, flat paw, half of it missing.
The pain passed, and he tried to stand, realizing belatedly that he was standing, but on his wolf legs and feet. He wasn’t sure he would like being so short in a fight.
The leader barked, and the pack surged forward. Another dog, a steel-colored one with mismatched eyes of gray and blue, snarled at him and he cowered instinctively, then hated himself for doing it. But the wolf was appeased, and moved in front of him.
They ran, and Max found himself straining to outpace the whole pack. Only real, conscious effort kept him from running off wildly into the woods around them. He had a goal. The details of it were a little murky now, but he knew he had to stay the course.
Something in the air changed. He could smell it. It was a bright, crisp note of ozone, like after a lightning strike. It smelled like magic. He didn’t know how, but it did.
The pack sped up, bursting through the trees into a wide, open lawn. Nothing was there. Nothing to fight. No chance to rend some enemy’s flesh and feast on his innards.
A low rumble shook the ground, growing in intensity. The leader turned and growled at them. It wasn’t Patton, but it was as inspiring a prebattle speech as could be accomplished by a dog.
Cracks appeared in the ground. The enemy was here. They were just early.
“They’re here. Raise them!” The Soul Eater’s lips were white with fury as he shouted at the necromancer. “The rest of you, get out there and protect me!”
The purple-robed attendants looked at each other from behind their faceless gold masks. A ripple of fear went through them. Obviously, they weren’t prepared or inspired to fight.
“Do it,” the necromancer commanded. “Or I can finish you all off!”
They crowded toward the front door, and Cyrus pulled me after him.
“Not you, Cyrus,” the Soul Eater called. “We’ll need you.”
He stopped, still clutching my hand. His eyes were large and pleading behind his mask, but I shook off his hold. If I stayed, the Soul Eater would know, and he’d be able to call his minions back to kick my ass. Once they were outside and distracted by their own fight, it would be safe to begin mine. I just hoped I could think of a way to save Cyrus in the meantime.
I turned away from him and followed the crush.
The vampires all stopped in a cluster at the bottom of the stairs. I looked in the same direction they all stared. Forty or fifty werewolves, in wolf form, stood, visible only from their shimmering eyes, at the trees lining the edge of the yard.
The vampires began to whip off their masks, and I panicked. If I took off mine, the Soul Eater could recognize me. Or, maybe one of the goons here would recognize me. I’d been to the vampire New Year party, and I’d been in March’s brothel. The chance that some of these vampires might have seen me on either occasion was slim, but disturbingly real.
I didn’t have long to worry about it. The ground at our feet began to rumble, and I staggered for balance as it began to shake and split. The house behind us creaked and groaned, and I wondered what would be safer, running toward the werewolves or staying right next to a collapsing house. From the steaming fissures that formed in the ground, the stench of sulfur and something worse, something unspeakably disgusting, rose up.
A skeletal hand appeared, clawing at the ground, pulling an arm swathed in tattered flesh and fabric. And from every other crack in the trembling ground, body parts in varying states of decay emerged.
We’d warded the cemeteries, but we’d never thought about what might have been buried around the house.
The zombies were barely out of the ground when the werewolves rushed to attack. I turned toward the driveway, looking to the trees lining the road. My eyes only had to scan back and forth twice before I saw the Henries marching down the lawn in militaristic rank and file. I knew who I could thank for that.
“What the hell are those?” a vampire next to me shouted, drawing the attention of the others to the lines of Henries, who broke file and ran, shouting, oddly uniform, as they rushed the vampires.
The werewolves tore into the zombies, breaking bones in their jaws and spitting out putrid flesh. But the parts of corpses that fell didn’t die. They just fought harder.
Above the occasional yip of an injured dog or a scream of a vampire falling to either the Henries or the wolves or the zombies—who didn’t seem to know or care what side they were on—I noticed a strange silence from the house. It seemed like there should be, I didn’t know, chanting or something. I didn’t see anyone through the windows, and I needed to get back to Cyrus and kill the Soul Eater before he became a god.
I edged my way back to the porch steps and had one foot up when someone pulled me back. I looked down in horror at the hand grasping the hem of my robe. Rotting red flesh with a few hanging tags of green skin still clinging to it half covered stained finger bones like a tattered glove. The long bones of the forearm appeared to be fused together, until I noticed that it was soil and grass impacted between them. A large, mucus-covered white larva curled out of it and fell to the ground.
The arm, horrible as it was, was nothing compared to the creature it was attached to, a zombie missing half its skull and the rest of its body beneath the rib cage. The piece of head that was left had slipped down the spinal column and hung there like a grim necklace, a rotting black eye held in the socket by bloated facial skin.
The thing held me with its one arm, trying to climb up my robe, dragging its decomposed body behind it. I pulled the purple velvet over my head, shaking the grasping fingers free of my leg beneath the fabric. I lurched up the steps, then realized too late that I didn’t have a weapon.
It was part of the plan Nathan had objected to and that I had insisted on. Not knowing if there would be security measures at the door, I hadn’t wanted to walk in strapped with weapons only to blow the whole plan the second someone checked me for them.
Unfortunately, this left me with some difficulty. While it seemed the vampires around me hadn’t thought twice about bringing knives and stakes and swords, it wasn’t as if there were vampires dying all around me and leaving me with anything I could use. I considered pulling a piece of the porch rail up to use as a stake, but I wanted something with a longer range.
At the corner of the porch, a vampire with long, red hair wielded a sword clumsily against a snarling werewolf. I made my move fast, before she could actually hurt the animal. I pulled myself up to stand on the rail and launched myself onto her, praying I’d miss the sword. The werewolf backed down a little, obviously surprised, and she turned, face frozen in an unflattering expression of confusion. We both tumbled to the ground, and either her inexperience or lack of preparedness caused her to drop the sword. I grabbed it and while she still scrambled for my hands, turned it and speared it through her chest. She exploded into a puff of flame and ash, and I jumped back up, brushing myself off. My hair flew wildly around my face, and I realized that in the confusion my mask had been knocked off.
The werewolf regarded me for a moment, then, apparently deciding that I was on its side, turned its attention to a shambling zombie.
A vampire near me had seen what I’d done. He still wore his mask and robe, but I could tell from his height and build that he would be trouble. He charged at me, and I ran, around the side of the house facing
the woods, and prayed no more wolves waited in the trees. The vampire in the mask pursued me, and he was fast. Faster than I was. He overtook me by a few crucial steps, picked me up and slammed me into the neglected rosebushes at the side of the house.
The impact knocked the wind out of me, otherwise I would have shouted at the pain of the thorns pricking through my clothes. I tried to pull my double vision into focus as the vampire removed his mask and shrugged back the hood of his cloak.
“Remember me?” he purred, his face twisted into his vampiric visage.
I couldn’t tell from his face, but his long blond hair and his body seemed familiar. He was muscular now, but he’d been even more so when I’d met him at March’s brothel. The disease that had been killing him had obviously taken a toll before he’d been changed. “Evan.”
He laughed, the sound demonic due to his twisted face.
“You got turned,” I said, shrugging helplessly in his grasp. “Congratulations.”
“No thanks to you.” He flashed his teeth. “You were going to let me die.”
I forced myself into feeding mode and snapped my jaws at him. “So what? So, I didn’t turn you into a vampire. Waaah. I don’t have time for your stupid personal vendetta.”
“Why, because you have to kill the Soul Eater?” He shoved me hard against the siding. “I saw you kill that other vampire.”
“And you’re not going to let me get away with killing Jacob blah blah blah.” I punctuated my sentence with a sharp head butt that forced him to drop me.
The sword lay on the ground where I’d dropped it, and I dived after it. He recovered quickly, and made his own dive for the sword. I got my hands on it first, but he got his hands on me, preventing me from getting up. He crawled over my body, toward the sword clutched in my outstretched hands. I tried to turn over and smash him with it, but he was too close for me to do much with the blade, and I knew if he got it, I was as good as skewered.
Still, I had to try. As I flipped onto my back, trying to wriggle free and still keep the sword out of his grasp, he screamed. And then he lifted off me. I watched as he flew at least six feet off the ground. He crashed back down, and his assailant was upon him again.
It was a werewolf, a dirty, yellowish-gray werewolf. It loomed over him, biting down on his throat to keep him from screaming.
I took my chance and climbed to my feet, scooping up the sword. As I turned to run, the wolf howled, and I turned, ready to strike him down if I had to. “I’m one of the good guys,” I reassured it, and it pawed at Evan’s motionless chest. I looked down, and saw that the paw was little more than a ruined stump. And it was where Max’s maimed hand would have been.
I covered my mouth and dropped the sword in shock. I knew, of course, that he would be here. I just hadn’t thought I would see him in his wolf form. It was bizarre, and I was torn between wanting to pet him and thinking of how strange vampire-form Max would have found that.
He barked at me, then trotted away from Evan’s immobile form. I wondered how long it would take Evan to heal, and hoped the werewolves weren’t just doing half their job out there. But I didn’t have time to worry about that. I hurried to Evan’s side. He was still unconscious, which made it much easier to line up the point of the blade with his chest and jam it down without resistance. I didn’t stay to watch his ashes settle into the grass.
The backyard was oddly calm, considering what was happening in the front yard. At the farthest back corner I spotted a crude graveyard, evidenced by dark, humped mounds of dirt. They appeared undisturbed, though, and I wondered if the necromancer had been able to raise just the corpses in the front yard, without disturbing the ones in the backyard.
The back door was on another, smaller porch, so I didn’t see until I was actually up the steps that there was no one inside the house. The circle on the floor was exactly as it was before, and the altar was set up exactly as it had been. They had left. And they’d also left behind all of their impressive-looking tools.
As if I was being sucked backward into the blood tie, my own memories rampaged through my mind. I thought of all the spells I’d cast from Dahlia’s book, all of the flashy ingredients that had been meant to throw people off the track of actually completing the spell.
They were doing the ritual somewhere else. I spun, scanning the yard helplessly.
The barn!
The side yard between the barn and the house was littered with body parts, but there was no immediate fight to impede me. My feet pounded on the hard earth, so loud I was sure the Soul Eater would hear me coming. I forced myself to slow and creep the last few feet. A short earthen rise angled up to the doors, one of which was open a crack. Light and a terrible smell leaked out. I covered my mouth with my shirtsleeve and tried not to gag as I peeked through the opening.
One glance inside revealed where the smell was coming from. All of the Soul Eater’s human victims—and those of his guests—must have been stored here for later disposal. Rotting bodies, bloated from the heat and the early stages of decay, were stacked around the perimeter of the barn like sandbags. They created walls at least six feet high. It was a good thing the necromancer hadn’t animated these corpses, or the werewolves and the Henries would have been overcome way too easily.
Then I realized this might be the last line of defense, the reserves, so to speak, and I wanted to make a run for it.
Then I saw the proceedings inside, and I knew I had to do something.
Cyrus lay spread-eagled on the ground, staked out with short ropes. His robes were gone, and his pale chest was bare above the waist of his black trousers. The Soul Eater sat on a throne, much like the one in the house, but this one appeared to be made out of human limbs and torsos. He was at ease on the grisly pile, actually smiling as he watched the necromancer dip a large stick tipped with a bundled-up rag into a simmering cauldron. When he removed it, the rag dripped with something tarry and black. He slapped it onto Cyrus’s chest, painting it over his skin in a scalding line. He grimaced and strained against the ropes, but they held.
This is all flash, Dahlia informed me witheringly. This guy thinks he’s David Copperfield or something. All Jacob has to do is drink the potion, then drink Cyrus, then release all the other souls trapped in him. Then this necromancer guy has to worship him, and then it’s done.
The necromancer just has to worship him? Weren’t there already enough babbling sycophants who worshippeds Jacob Seymour? What stopped him from being a god before?
He had to perform certain tasks first. You know, like when a saint has to do three miracles to become a saint? Guided by Dahlia, I saw Jacob instructing her to give Cyrus the potion that had been intended to create a natural-born vampire. He’d achieved that goal easily. Then, I saw Dahlia snarling and rounding up five vampires—March, the vampire madam, among them—so that Jacob could destroy his own vampire progeny. And finally, she showed me Jacob clutching a dried-up, withered object in his fist and plunging it into an eerie green flame leaping out of a cauldron. The same cauldron, I realized, as the one in the barn right now.
Forge the sword, spill your own blood, and then the test of fire. He’s not a vampire anymore. He’s more like…more like a god in waiting.
So, he’ll be harder to kill? I didn’t need her to answer the question. I dried my hands on my jeans, then gripped the sword in one hand and braced the other one on the door. What about Nathan’s skin? The symbols on it, to call his soul back.
What do you think is in the cauldron? Besides various herbs and holy water, of course.
Mentally, I shushed her. It’s showtime now. Are you with me, or against me?
Against you, she responded with no hesitation. But lucky for you, that means I’m going to help you.
I’d never pretended to understand Dahlia in the past. “Whatever,” I said under my breath, fully prepared to weather a change in her mood that might lead to me fighting her internally, and the Soul Eater externally.
I pushed the door open. Both the So
ul Eater and the necromancer looked up at once. Cyrus, still writhing in pain from the burning, tarry potion on him, took longer to notice me. When he did, his face slid from a pinched expression of agony to an exhausted smile of relief.
“Jacob Seymour!” I shouted, raising the sword in both hands, ready for the fight. I couldn’t believe that was my voice, loud and echoing off the walls of the barn.
The Soul Eater stood, his eyes blazing with fury. “By order of the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement, which is no longer functioning, I am sentenced to death for my crimes against humanity. I’ve heard it all before.”
“I’m not here for them.” I tightened my grip. “This is all for me.”
Twenty-Three:
Endgame
“H ow’s it look?”
Ziggy lowered the binoculars and passed them to Bill, so he could see for himself. “The zombies are almost gone. Some of the Henries are having problems with the vampires, but I don’t see too many dead werewolves. One or two, at the most.”
“Guess they won’t be needing our help after all.” Bill sounded disappointed at that. “Not that I really need to go in and start killing people left and right. But it would have been nice to get my hands a little dirty.”
“It’s not over yet,” Ziggy reminded him. “Carrie might need our help, still.”
Though she had said over and over that it was every man for himself, he and Bill had agreed that it would be stupid to let her get killed when they might be able to save her.
Nate had said something along those lines, too, now that Ziggy had a chance to slow down and think about their talk back at the apartment.
“Carrie knows what she has to do. Don’t get yourself killed trying to save her. Let her do what she has to. And let me do what I have to, okay?”
He’d agreed then, thinking it sounded a little bit like a mother scolding her kid for climbing too high on the jungle gym at the playground, but he’d really just said the words to make Nate feel better.
Blood Ties Omnibus Page 124